What is a Cloud? A Website Hosting Term.

What is a Cloud? A Website Hosting Term.

What is a Cloud? Usually a term used in Website Hosting.

Clouds are everywhere on the net. It has it’s positives and negatives.

What is Cloud Hosting?

I don’t think a cloud is a valuable tool for most business websites. Here is a small document that explains how a cloud works in Website Hosting.

The story is that a client in Melbourne with local customers has decided to host their website in the US Servers. This document goes into the matter a little deeper and explains the benefits of a cloud hosting and if it really helps your site.

Although it is enticing and exciting to get a server in the US it really serve little purpose when it comes to ranking sites that are located non-local.

A Cloud is used to make serving the website faster to visitors in different locations. So a person in Melbourne could be served a cached version that is located in the cloud and this is a snapshot of the site, where as a person close to the server could be directly accessing the contents from the server and getting the latest update. It is good for businesses that have customer all over the world.

The cached version depends how it stores the content and how often it recreates a cache of the original site. Google Webmaster Tools could very well be sitting far away from the server and could be getting a cached version that has not been updated.

I don’t bother with Cloud hosting when the business website is locally based like a Driving School. Perhaps you too should avoid using Cloud Hosting or switch off the cloud. Most of your visitors are from Melbourne (one point).

Also, when you’re using a server that is in another location outside the city or even the country then your site will not be ranked favorably on search engines for local listing. This is why I went to great extent to mention to you why you moved your website to a US server. It is not SEO wise. I saw your listing for “Driving School Melbourne” search drop from page 1 to page 2 when you moved your site to the US. Anyway, this is my understanding and I see most sites on page 1 for this term have website hosting on Australian servers if not Melbourne Servers.

Just remember, if you’re not serving clients outside your region then avoid cloud and have website hosting on local server physically located in your region, that is, if you want to rank high on a search engine.